| 1. | to look forward to; regard as likely to happen; anticipate the occurrence or the coming of: I expect to read it. I expect him later. She expects that they will come. |
| 2. | to look for with reason or justification: We expect obedience. |
| 3. | Informal. to suppose or surmise; guess: I expect that you are tired from the trip. |
| 4. | to anticipate the birth of (one's child): Paul and Sylvia expect their second very soon. |
| 5. | be expecting, to be pregnant: The cat is expecting again. |

ex·pect (ĭk-spěkt') v. ex·pect·ed, ex·pect·ing, ex·pects v. tr.
[Latin exspectāre : ex-, ex- + spectāre, to look at, frequentative of specere, to see; see spek- in Indo-European roots.] ex·pect'a·ble adj., ex·pect'a·bly adv., ex·pect'ed·ly adv., ex·pect'ed·ness n. Synonyms: These verbs relate to the idea of looking ahead to something in the future. To expect is to look forward to the likely occurrence or appearance of someone or something: "We should not expect something for nothing—but we all do and call it Hope" (Edgar W. Howe). |
expect language, tool
A Unix tool written in Tcl and a script language for automating the operation of interactive applications such as telnet, FTP, passwd, fsck, rlogin, tip, etc.. Expect can feed input to other programs and perform pattern matching on their output. It is also useful for testing these applications. By adding Tk, you can also wrap interactive applications in X11 GUIs.
(http://expect.nist.gov/).
["expect: Scripts for Controlling Interactive Tasks", Don Libes, Comp Sys 4(2), U Cal Press Journals, Nov 1991].
(1997-06-09)